Designing fast, reliable in-memory file systems for non-volatile memory

Abstract

Traditional computer systems store permanent data in the file system, whereas they keep temporary data only used while running applications on the main memory. As new technologies introduce non-volatile memories powerful enough to close the performance gap of the previous generation non-volatile memories, we can devise a new memory system that replaces DRAM with non-volatile memory for the main memory. Once the main memory becomes non-volatile by adopting non-volatile memory devices, it can be used for file systems to store permanent data. To adopt a new memory technology, we discuss a new file system based on tmpfs with three aspects that need to be included, and evaluate its performance against popular file systems such as ext4.